Send Media Messages

Overview

This guide shows how to send non-templated WhatsApp messages to WhatsApp recipients using our APIs. Follow these instructions.

Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. If this is your first time using Plivo APIs, follow our instructions to set up a Python development environment.

You can only send a non-templated WhatsApp message as a reply to a user-initiated conversation or as part of an existing ongoing conversation that started with a templated WhatsApp message.

Create the send WhatsApp application

Create a file called send_whatsapp.py and paste into it this code.

import plivo
client = plivo.RestClient('<auth_id>','<auth_token>')
response = client.messages.create(
         src="+14151112221",
         dst="+14151112222",
         type_="whatsapp",
         text="whatsapp_video",
         media_urls=["https://sample-videos.com/img/Sample-png-image-1mb.png"]
        )
print(response)
#prints only the message_uuid
print(response.message_uuid)

Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholders with your phone numbers in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234). src should be a phone number registered to your WhatsApp Business Account. dst should be the recipient’s WhatsApp number.

Pass media using a hosted media URL. For details about this param, refer to our documentation.

Note: We recommend that you store your credentials in the auth_id and auth_token environment variables to avoid accidentally committing them to source control. If you do this, you can initialize the client with no arguments and Plivo will automatically fetch the values from the environment variables. You can use process.env to store environment variables and fetch them when initializing the client.

Test

Save the file and run it.

Note: If you’re using a Plivo trial account, you can only send messages to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify (sandbox) a number by going to the console’s Phone Numbers > Sandbox Numbers page.